Horvat Redux

(Photo by Frank Horvat)

I wrote my Fan's Note to Mr. Frank Horvat as I said I would. It was a gushy missive of appreciation for his immense talent and his willingness to change his work with new technologies as they develop. In sixty years of photography (Mr. Horvat is now nearly eighty), he has seen a lot of changes.

To my happy surprise, he wrote back straight away. I would like to publish his note here, but that would not be right. But his writing is an analog to his work, very open and generous. Now, there is much more I would like to say to him, and much more that I would like to ask, but how does one do such a thing without being a pest or worse?

When I Googled him, I was surprised to find that there is no Wikipedia page about him. I know, I know, but everyone has a Wikipedia page. I am thinking of writing one about him. A tribute.

But that is not enough. Going through his CV, I do not find a big retrospective show in the U.S. He is more than deserving of that. Perhaps I will barrage the ICP with letters, mount a campaign. Why haven't the Met or MoMA done something? But I don't really know how such things work. The Staley-Wise Gallery in New York represents his work, and the art scene there is something beyond my hillbilly comprehension.

But I can't help myself. I must quote from one part of his response. In part, he said:

The difference between a Leica and a digital compact is about as great as between a horse and a motor car. People who fail to recognize this are simply not living in the present. There is nothing wrong with a horse or a Leica, it’s just a pity not to use a car when it’s available.

This from a man who has made some of the most beautiful film images you will ever see.

Make me write the Wikipedia page. Before I publish it, though, I will send it to him for approval.

(Photo by Frank Horvat)

"I am . . ."

There is no need to tell you, of course, that last night was the Full Wolf Moon, the brightest of the year. Nor to tell you why. It was a well-publicized moon, indeed. I didn't think I would get to see it where I live because of cloud cover, but it was merely hazy, not congested, and so when I walked out of my house in my weakened state and looked over the roofs of the houses across the street, there it was. I grabbed my camera as I always do and walked the neighborhood. I felt better than I had. Perhaps it was only moving, but I had been out earlier in the day and that hurt me rather than helped. I'd prefer to think it was the pull of the moon itself combined with some ocular stimulation, a sort of primitive synergy at work in the reptilian part of my too bad brain. Who knows? There may be no miracles, but that doesn't mean that there aren't mysteries. The world is full of them at the most basic level, that being those things that are as of yet unexplained. I love science and what it does, but I do not wish to be blinded by it into seeing only that part of existence that is revealed by evidence. There are an infinite number of problems of which we have yet to conceive. The best scientists are artists at heart in search of those things you and I have not yet thought of. The worst are mere artisans practicing their craft.

The night was warm, and I walked slowly in shorts and a t-shirt in the shortened steps of a shut-in noticing how lovely the neighborhood was in the night. It is an old neighborhood, not a development, and where I live, that is an oddity. I am a bit of a voyeur as are most photographers, I think, and I gazed into the windows as I passed the houses, feeling the warm light that spilled outside. Stories in every house, lives expanding and contracting like the tide, the old ebb and flood more pronounced with this full moon.

Looking out over the lake, there was the warm breeze and the hooting of owls calling to one another. A mystery. What were they saying? I was certain that it was simply what we all are saying always. "I am here. Here I am."

Frank Horvat

(Photo by Frank Horvat)

I don't know why more Frank Horvat books are not available. He is one of my favorite photographers. More than that. You must look at his website. It is a wonder. Though I have yet to do so, I will write and tell him of my adoration. Today. Just after this entry. I am disappointed that there is not even a Wiki page on him. Someone must do him justice. He was born in 1928 and in 2006 began a diary of digital photographs, a project that culminated in a 2009 publication. Everything he does is charming. He simply never quit evolving. Go to his website. Look. He might change the way you want to live your life.

(Photo by Frank Horvat)

My own life needs more charm. I will work on that just as soon as I regain my feet. Yesterday, I simply lay upon the couch listening to music and daydreaming, half in thought, half asleep. In illness, we dream of the past, glory days when we were heroic and strong. And then. . . we are gripped by The Fear. I will try my feet today. We shall see.

1-28-20

I made a Facebook account a while back so that I could view something a friend wanted me to see. But I didn't want an account, so I put up my father's name and birthday. As a result, I have been getting birthday wishes. It is very sweet and I am touched. Truly.

My father was a hell of a great guy. He would be ninety today, but he has been gone a long time now. He has missed a lot, but he hasn't missed much, if you know what I mean. He was thick and strong from working on the farm in his youth. He boxed in the navy in WWII and later trained boxers at my uncle's gym. He used his G.I. Bill to go to trade school and learned to be a tool and dye maker. He worked at that the rest of his life. It was a rough life, I think, working every day and often overtime, making all the money he could. Then, every year, there was a two week vacation. But my father was a romantic and wanted to travel. When I was young, he twice quit jobs to take my mother and me around the country for months. We saw everything. One year, after returning to Ohio, the Little Miami River flooded our house and my father decided to move to Florida. We had been there several times, and it was still a frontier.

But after that move, he never really travelled again. I remember as a kid that a man my father knew, "Lucky Lochier," who my father called a millionaire, bought a yacht and asked my father to sail it with him. My mother, of course, said no, and that was that. From then on, he worked his fifty weeks, taking us some weekends to stay with my aunt and uncle who lived near the coast. And there was the two week vacation in August.

After twenty years of marriage, my father and mother got a divorce, and my father left everything. He moved into a little one bedroom duplex and lived alone until I came to live with him a year later. He never got remarried and died when he was sixty.

The gods turn their backs on the aged. That is what I learned then. If you don't have people, and often even if you do, you are on your own.

I tried to work through this terrible flu I've caught, but that only made it worse. Today, I've called in sick. I will drink soup and sleep and try not to think of all the things that have piled up on me that need to be done. I will put on music and doze on the couch and hope to feel better in the morning.

To Be Wonderful

(photo by Igor Vasilladis)

Still sick. Haven't shot a photo in a very long time. Started to make a set in my studio but haven't completed it. I am flummoxed. Being sick and incomplete is a terrible thing on a brilliant day, but there you have it. The sun shines, the sky is intensely blue, the air crisp and cool. My throat is sore, my nose is running, and my mind is filled with trepidation. The past piles up against the future, heavy and burdensome. Horrors on a beautiful day.

But there is this photo by Igor Vasilladis, a Russian who sometimes works in wet plate. I'd never heard of him until today. Such beautiful things. I will write to him, but I think I may not hear back. He is listed as "one of the top ten photographers in Russia." He may be busy.

More equipment arrived yesterday for my own wet plate production. Much to do and so little time. And all this desire to be wonderful.

Down

I've got the sickness. I'm down. Garden variety with a spiritual component. Most of the people I work with have had the physical part in the last week. I didn't ask about the other.

So here's my advice. Fix your own food and keep your hands to yourself. Drink plenty of fluids and get lots of sleep.

Beyond that, you're on your own.

Salon

Conversation overheard while getting hair cut.

Girl to hair stylist:

"What kind of makeup do you use?"

"I just use the cheapest kind."

"Really!?"

"Yes, but I don't use much makeup anyway. I think ***** is a good brand and it's cheap. But all the gay guys swear by ******."

"Really?! They say that's the one, huh?"

"Yes. That is all they will use. They say it is by far the best."

"Is it expensive?"

"Yes, it costs about twice as much as the makeup I use. But they say it's worth it."

The customer thinks heavily about this before buying $150.00 worth of hair product.

I'm impressed. If I wore makeup, I believe that I would have to give it a try.

iPhone

(last night)

The fellow who sent the iPhone images also sent me his old iPhone so that I could play with the camera apps. I got it yesterday, and I have to say that it is fun. I bought one app so far, the "Hipstamatic." For a buck-ninety-nine, it comes with two types of film and three different lenses. It gives you the option to buy more of each. I have the old phone, as I say, so the camera is not nearly as good as on the newest version. These apps, though, make instant what many people have worked hard to develop in Photoshop. It was inevitable, of course. It is digital.

The foundry called me yesterday to let me know they have mounted the old brass 19th century lens I bought to the lens board. I have some developing tanks coming from the Star Camera Company, too. I will soon be ready to make collodion images just like the shutterbugs of the 19th century. It is very difficult work.

But I like them both. I like all the visual arts and communications, no matter what the technique.

I hope they make these apps available for using in other digital imaging programs. I know that many people will deride and dismiss them, but not me. In talented hands, everything works.

(this morning)

I Would Have Saved Them. . . .

Those images of Haiti do not tell you much. It is unimaginable there. No matter what you think, there is despair beyond the things you can make up. Not intermittently. Every minute without thinking that it is going to end, because minute leads to minute leads to interminable minute, on and on, day after day until that is all there is, just that.

But we all suffer something horrible some time, and the suffering in Haiti does not mitigate our own. There is no shortage of it. There is more than enough to go around.

I think of the horror in Haiti, but I cannot sustain it, my mind returning to itself. "I will go to Haiti," I tell myself, "and I will help to build a house." Well intentioned, I feel a release.

A friend called. He has lost his job, lost his home, and then gone mad. How will he pick up the pieces? How will he ever get back to where he was?

The title of a book I read long ago keeps running through me: "I Would Have Saved Them If I Could."

Loss

("Diana the Huntress", Master of the Fountainbleau School, 1550)

Loss. Sometimes there is only one way to go. You can lose much: a parent, a child, a significant other. You can lose a job, your house, money, friends. You can lose your health, and you can lose your confidence, too. You can lose yourself and a sense of purpose. Any of those can be a terrible thing.

But sometimes it all piles up and you can feel it. You know that at any moment, you are going to lose it all. You know the cards are dealt and there is nothing you can do or not do. You know it is about to happen. You think, "I've had my time. What did I do?"

You can lose your relevance, your significance, your opportunities.

You can lose things you never knew you possessed.

It is what we have. Count on it.

"Was It a Real Movie?"

My major was zoology, but all I really wanted to do was take special topics courses. They were the discovery of my life. Mike and I had decided to take a course called "The Films of Charlie Chaplin." It was random on our part. It is just what we did.

The course was taught by a visiting professor named Horwitz who had made a film that had been a minor success, so he was something of a name. The course was taught in an auditorium holding about a hundred students, and from the moment Horwitz walked onto the stage, the room was transformed as if by magic.

He was a bearish man with longish hair and a very thick beard, and separated as he was by the stage, he looked much bigger than life. Horwitz had somehow managed to get bootlegged copies of all of Chaplin's films, and he had made a course out of them. But it was more than that. Horwitz loved those films, and he made us love them, too. Each week, we'd come to class more enraptured than the week before, Horwitz explaining the intricacies of The Tramp and how the character evolved. We'd listen to his lecture, then sit in the dark as the Chaplin image flickered across the screen accompanied only by the click-click-click of the film running through the projector in the little room above. Nobody breathed. We learned about comedy in the early films, then about pathos in the "The Kid." "Gold Rush" made us howl. "City Lights" let us weep. But always there was Horwitz somehow interweaving his magic with Chaplin's, himself looming in our imaginations. Even the students with whom we sat took on a supernal hipness and profundity. Though we never spoke in class, we began to recognize one another outside the classroom, and we knew. There had never been anything like this.

One day, Mike and I came upon Horwitz standing outside before class. He was alone, smoking a cigarette in an invisible bubble, students piled around its perimeter, glancing at him in his repose but not daring to approach. But Mike and I had come upon him unawares suddenly finding ourselves standing next to The Man himself.

"Hello," Mike said. "I really enjoy your lectures."

"Ah, yes," he said.

Mike asked him something and he said something as I stood by thinking, "Look at us! We're talking to Harry Horwitz! People are watching. I mean man, man, we are something. We are something."

Horwitz was talking about the film he made, Mike nodding like a bobble head to show he was getting it and agreed. I was feeling like a hanger-on, I guess, a sidekick, since I hadn't really contributed anything to the conversation, so I said--and oh how many times I've wished since then that I could take it back--"Was it a real movie?" It was like the sound of cars crashing, of twisting metal and shattering glass. Harry looked like he had been sucker punched.

I had never heard of the movie he had made, and what I had meant to ask was whether it was a feature film or a documentary. Really, I think that is what I was trying to ask, though it has never mattered since. I had blundered. The thing was done. Horowitz looked at me with a special distaste and snarled, "Yea, a real movie, you know, popcorn and theaters." And with that he stubbed out his cigarette and turned away.

Mike looked at me like I'd just shit my pants, but he was laughing. "What the hell was that!" he asked?

"I don't know. I didn't mean it like that."

"Jesus, man, you'd better be glad he doesn't know your name."

That was the day we watched "Modern Times." Inside the darkened auditorium, Horwitz spoke to us of the genius of Chaplin in his use of sound, of how other silent film stars failed in the "talkies" because their voices were not what audiences expected them to be, but Chaplin had put off speaking until the end of this film, not speaking at all but singing a song instead. And that day, for the first time all term, there was sound, and we all watched with great anticipation through the recordings and the mechanical voices never spoken by humans but always coming from machines instead, us watching The Tramp and The Orphan, waiting, waiting. And then. . . .

A collective chill ran through the room, a palpable trembling you could feel like a low vibration. We were groupies, and Horowitz had prepared us for this all term. This was The Moment. We were shaken by a religious frenzy.

Oh, it is not of any use to tell this if you weren't there, if you had not sat in that hall all semester long, if you had not been whipped up and prepared. But we all knew. It had been a seminal moment. Everything had changed.

The next semester, Horwtiz taught another class, this one focusing on other silent film stars of the era. Mike and I did not sign up for the class. We probably could not have as news of the Chaplin course had spread across campus like wildfire and everyone wanted in. But Mike and I went to the theater a few times just to sit in on the course, and it was not the same. This was the second wave, people who had heard but came too late like Americans in Paris in the 30's. Nothing, we knew, could be like that again.

R.F.D.

I'm sitting in the pitch black dark. Have been for a long time now. Nightmares. The worst kind, those that are not made up. Just sleeping reflections, really, seeing your life through a new lens that doesn't distort, just selects. You can see your life and the lives of others you know, have known, won't know, and the comparison is not favorable. And then the weight of it comes down on you as you try to get back to some peaceful place. But the peace won't come, only the jitters and the jags. And then you're up. Little fish in a big pond.

And yet, sitting here in the ghostly light of this screen, I still can't figure out if I over or under-reached. I only know that I am poised for failure. Not so good when you've yet to achieve.

That is what the darkness tells me now.

* * * * *

Mike and I got along like champs and life was swell. The days took on a liberal rhythm which we rode like long, beautiful waves. Everything seemed like an open secret, rich and fertile. The country in which we lived was filled with farms. Many of the corn and tobacco farmers were also harvesting pot which they planted in the middle of fields mixed in between the other plants making it hard to spot from the air. Our town grew some of the finest pot in the country. And even though neither of us were smoking, it was a thrill just knowing we were there. It seemed like a movie. Anything could happen.

One day, I was driving through the countryside with a girl I hardly knew. She asked me to pull over to the side of the road. "Come on," she said, opening the car door. I had no idea what we were doing, but I followed her on a little dirt path through a stand of trees. In less than a minute, we stood looking down at a natural spring, a sinkhole lined with boulders that formed a small cove. A naked couple sat on the rocks and was smoking a joint. They waved and we waved. "You want to go swimming?" my newish friend asked. "When?" She laughed and bumped down the rock wall and took off her sun dress and jumped into the water. I sat above acting like I wasn't watching her, like I was a botanist there to survey the fauna. Quickly, she slithered over to the couple, and she said something and they said something and then they handed her the joint. I felt stupid sitting up above with my long pants and work boots, a spectator to life, but I was excited, too. I was certain this had never happened to my father.

In a little bit, she came back up to where I sat. "How'd you know about this place," I asked her? "Oh," she said, "I come here sometimes. There are a lot of little springs like this around, but I like this one best. The owner doesn't care if people come here." She was standing above me, not quite dry, slipping her sun dress back over her head. "C'mon, let's pick some blackberries," she said pulling me along the fence line that separated the prairie from the highway. The wild, prickly bushes were heavy and full.

One night, Mike and I went to eat two-for-one-pizzas-and-beer with J.R. and Sandy. J.R. and Mike had been friends since elementary school and so the conversation always fell to them. I would comment on something from time to time, but I'd always get the feeling from J.R. that I was crashing a party to which I hadn't been invited. I didn't like him, really, nor the way Mike's voice would take on J.R.'s exaggerated southern drawl, the vowels flattening out and lengthening like he'd been raised in Mayberry, every time the two of them got together. But that is how it was and that was how it was that night, me sitting a little awkwardly eating and looking around like a kid trying to entertain himself while the adults conversed.

And as they talked and I looked around, I felt something bump my leg. It was Sandy's foot, and I thought I wasn't giving her enough room. But that wasn't it. She looked at me for a moment, her eyes telling me to be quiet, and then began moving her foot until it was in my lap. Sort of. I was paralyzed with excitement and with fear. I sat listening to the certain tones as J.R. talked thinking. And after a while, my heart began to slow a bit. I was trying not to look at Sandy too much. She was going to get us in trouble, I thought. She was smiling. Fuck J.R. Goddamn. Sandy was beautiful.

Better Than You or Me

I did. I watched the Golden Globes last night. Ricky Gervais who hosted was spot on, as they say, about actors. Most important people in the world. Who cares about writers and directors. We just want to watch the pretty people. He was being ironic, of course, but irony only works where there is truth. These are the people we picture ourselves to be. What man hasn't gotten behind the wheel of an automobile once in awhile and in his head listened to the theme song from a James Bond movie? I've actually walked a red carpet at a film festival, and even that was a heady experience.

Now don't mistake me. I am not a geek for the real people, just the images. The real people are often disappointing. I once was having drinks with a friend of mine who had just won a national aerobatics championship flying his experimental bi-wing airplane. He had a fellow named Robert over who was going to race in the Twelve Hours of Sebring the next day, and my friend was going to fly him down. It was Robert's first time racing, and he was full of it. He was a witty guy and as we stood around the kitchen we traded barbs for quite awhile before something began to occur to me. His last name was Carradine, and slowly. . . .

"Heeeey, wait a minute, your brother is Keith?"

No shit, that is what I said. I went on about Keith Carradine whose film "The Moderns," as well as many others, was among my favorites. And then I spoke of David. Eventually, though, Robert was visibly miffed, and he said, "Yea, I made more money in 'Revenge of the Nerds' than either of them made in their entire careers." I had not seen that movie, so I was still slow on the uptake.

"Wait a minute, you're an actor, too," I told him as if he might not be aware, suddenly realizing the faux pas I'd been committing all night. "You were in 'One Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest.' Weren't you in 'The Long Riders" as well?'"

It was a grand night. I've still never seen the "Nerds" movies.

"Avatar" won Best Picture last night. That must have been, as Ricky Gervais suggested, bought and paid for. Jeff Bridges won best actor for a film most people haven't seen yet. And "Mad Men" won something. I was glad about that. The first two seasons are as filled with complexity as anything you will ever view on television. The third season, not so much. Here is a link of one of my favorite scenes on the show. It might not make sense isolated here, but I think you will recognize the "bride as prize" theme in it anyway. Christina Hendrick's character is one of the most complex on the show. And oh, she was b-e-a-u-t-i-f-u-l last night. I don't want to meet her.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QN4NyD6l8A

Instead of Not Posting

I thought not to post today, sick of self. But then I'd be like all the rest. Sick of others, too. Terrible diseases, those two. I have a friend who is really sick now, but she started with these two diseases, I think. There are others, many others. But these are bad enough. These will do.

My friend, C.C., and I tried to build a set in my studio yesterday. We had to get lumber and plywood and I do not have a truck, so I suggested we just try to strap it all to the surf racks on my hillbilly-mobile. We spent an hour looking at materials wondering what to buy before we asked for help. C. C. and I are alike in this. It would have been easy enough to locate all the materials and to feel we had done a good job. We could go to lunch knowing that we knew where everything was now when we needed it. All we would have to do later was go and get it. That would be something. Yes, that could have been enough. But heroically this day, we went further, actually buying half of the materials we needed, not yet willing to make a full commitment. But we had enough for a start.

Then came the real fun began. We put the plywood on the racks and started lashing it down with the synthetic string that Home Depot supplies. The day was gray and a bit blustery, and after we ran our lines and tied our knots, a gust of wind caught the plywood and lifted it about six inches off the racks. C.C. looked at me skeptically. "Ah, hell, I'll drive slow. We can keep a hand on it out the window." I stuck the eight foot two by fours in the car and let them stick out the back window, the broken one that won't go up all the way.

We hit the main road at twenty miles an hour, boards flapping a little, but not dangerously.

"I sure hope we don't see any cops."

"Shit, I hope we don't see anyone from work!"

I urged the car up to twenty-five before the wind got under them really well and scared us. I pulled into a parking lot. C.C. looked at me all bug-eyed wondering what I had in mind. We looked at the string that had stretched out a good bit. The boards were really just resting on the racks now.

I didn't know what to do. "I'll drive slower," I told him. "People will just have to go around." C.C. gave a fatalistic chortle. "Yea, they're going to blow off and kill somebody." "Ah, shit," I said "we can hold them down."

Pulling back onto the highway, we caught a break and had no traffic behind us at all as they were all caught at a long red light, so we were able to cruise in slow motion down the four-lane road the way you dream when you're stoned. But we weren't. We just felt ridiculous.

"My whole life is like this," I told C. C. "Ever since I was a kid, everything was just make-do. Hell, this is fun, huh?" I think he'd had enough of this kind of fun already.

"Look," I said, "we can cut through the K-Mart parking lot. We won't have to go fast there. And when we get out the other side, we're off the highway. Perfect."

When we got to the studio, C. C. said, "There is nothing holding the boards down. All the knots came undone."

"See, I told you we were good."

Three hours later, we had put up four eight foot two by fours and two four by eight panels.

"I wish someone had videotaped this."

"Abbot and Costello," C. C. said.

The whole day, though, I kept thinking, "What the hell am I doing? Spending money, making sets so I can pretend? What's wrong with me? This isn't what grown ups do."

And of course, this morning when I talked to my mother on the phone, she asked me what I did yesterday. And I couldn't say. I still haven't told her I rented the studio.

"Oh, nothing."

I think I'll go back to bed now. This didn't come out right. I think my first instinct was best.

I Can't Get No

Baby better come back later next week,

'Cause you see, I'm on a losing streak.

"Satisfaction," Mick Jagger, Keith Richards

Migration

The sun is out, the temperature is up, and the birds are going mad. They've come here for the winter, and now they're happy. Robins dominate the landscape today eating berries and bugs by the thousands. I went mad, too, trying to find a photo for today that was light enough for the moment. I had to make this one up just now, the light falling through the shutters onto the wall and pewter vase. So this has taken far too long. I have risen late, beat down by the stress of this incredibly onerous work week. And that is all there has been. It is not a good way to live. It is not even a good way to die.

I am going to India in a few months and must prepare for that. Visa, shots. Last night I watched two parts of the PBS series on India that won so many awards. The second part is about India in the 5th century B.C.E. Buddha. He begins as a prince, of course, then moves through the religious practices. And when he has finally eaten so little that his bones protrude and his buttocks hang limply, he comes to the conclusion that it has done him little good. Or so says the narrator of the documentary.

The best part of the story for me is that this man who had been a prince in the most princely fashion eschewed the palace to walk the country in search of something. And there it is. The Journey. The tyranny of most of what we do today is that it keeps us from journeying. I want to journey.

That is all I have today. It is very lame. But I am scared and desperate. This is the casting about of a desperate man.

Maybe I shouldn't listen so closely to those robins outside.

But at My Back I Always Hear. . .

No time today, none at all. Here is another of the lost photos of '75. I think this was '76, though. It was a time when I discovered that a camera flash made everything spooky.

iPhone Artistry

(Photo by Sean Cusick)

This photo was taken with an iPhone. I don't have one, so I don't know much about them, but it seems to have become the hot new camera. You can take seminars like these with people like this about how to make good photos with them now. My friend Sean has a degree in film, but he chose to become famous in the music world and forgot all about cameras and visual storytelling for many years. Notorious might be a better word. He insists I use his name and give him credit for the photograph, but it worries me. Nothing worries him. I try to stay anonymous. He is worse than Paris Hilton.

He used to be paid to travel the world playing in clubs from New York to Moscow to Shanghai to Buenos Aires. And he never took a photo. Now that he is married and settled down to a less conspicuous life, he has become interested in cameras once again. He is determined to put up his own site now, and I am certain it will be better than this one which pisses me off, but he was a clever boy genius and certainly some of that remains. I may link him when he gets the site up if he promises never to write about me. He can be sweet, but he can turn, too, like a bad date. No, the whole thing scares me horribly.

Certainly, he has lived a more colorful life than you or I. Don't protest. I promise. He has stories to tell and can use the language in clever ways.

But there is something else required and therein lies the tale. We shall see.

Go-Girls-Go

(1975)

I can't put up Irving Penn photos forever, though I'd like to do it much longer. I've dug back in the vault to come up with this image that has no negative, that no longer exists but as a 35mm image, corner to corner, on an old, degenerating proof sheet. But I've told the story before.

This image seems so crazy dangerous and enigmatic to me now. I don't need to write about it.

In looking up the Albert Camus quote I posted yesterday, I came across so many good ones that I've decided to go back and reread him, for so many of the quotations make him seem more prophetic than I ever thought him before. He seems to have given birth to much of the postmodern thought of Lacan and Derrida and Foucault. I think. I'll let you know.

“Pain is real when you get other people to believe in it. If no one believes in it but you, your pain is madness or hysteria.”

Naomi Wolf

Absurdity and Nature

(Photograph by Irving Penn)

It is bitterly cold and blue here. I went to the studio and shot some things yesterday, but nothing pleased me. I have nothing.

"We turn our backs on nature; we are ashamed of beauty. Our wretched tragedies have a smell of the office clinging to them, and the blood that trickles from them is the color of printer's ink."

Albert Camus, "Helen's Exile," (1948)

I must go to work.

Unlikely Twins

(Photo by Irving Penn)

It is unnaturally cold here, and my studio is not heated, so I do not work. Indoors nor out. I sit and listen to the heater whisper, "money, money, money." My house was built in 1926. Wood. Old windows. No insulation. It is not built for the cold. A few days of this is something we expect, but not weeks. It makes me lazy. And hungry.

I am dull. I have no photos.

So once again, I post an Irving Penn. I feel as if I'm stealing, but really, who should I ask?

I want to get along with my narrative, but I can't seem to write about the college years. I need to get through them to harder times. I was happy in college. It was in many ways the happiest time of my life. Certainly it was the most carefree. But it is difficult to write about happy. Happy teaches nothing. But it is important to write, for it provides the contrast. I will try.

* * * * *

After Christmas, Mike and I moved into the trailer park outside of town. Having never had a roommate before, I found living with someone other than my parents unnerving at first. We shared everything from the television to the bathroom. But we found solutions to most things. We divided everything down the middle and stayed strictly within our bounds. It worked. We shared nothing. We never went in on groceries together. We cooked and ate together every evening but never mixed our food, even when we were having the same thing. We washed our own dishes and ate our own snacks. We had our sides to the faux-leather couch in front of the television. Each night, Mike would open a carton of milk and a bag of cookies and eat them all. Never, not once in all the years we were there, did he offer me one. This was not a problem, just an odd fact. The cabinets where we stored our canned food were divided equally. We split every bill down the middle, and drove each other to campus on alternate days. We both took 9:30 classes, so we set our alarms for identical times, each set to the same radio station. We'd get up and each have three pieces of toast with jelly and two glasses of milk. And it worked. We never had a squabble.

At first, we had the idea of riding our bikes to campus, but it was January and the road into town was filled with big trucks at that time of day. There were hills to warm us up, but when we got to class, we'd have sweat through our shirts, so in the end, we decided to put our bikes on the back of our cars (we each had a bike rack), and use the bicycles on campus.

Several days a week, we'd meet for lunch at a vegetarian restaurant, the first we'd ever known. After school, we'd ride home and change clothes, then come back to campus to play basketball for a couple of hours. Then we'd come home, take showers, and begin to cook dinner which we would watch in front of the television with its stolen cable programming. After dinner, we'd clean up and then break out our guitars and play for awhile. On Wednesdays, we went to Sonny's Barbecue and had the student special, and after dinner we'd use the pay phone to make collect calls home to our parents to give them the weekly report. On Fridays, we'd look for the twenty dollar check we both got in the mail from home. Fridays were glorious, of course, and we would meet up with friends for two-for-one pizzas and pitchers of beer or whatever other student discount we could find, then we'd go to hear some music that one of us had heard about, often at some out of the way country bar where there would be a fiddle and banjo band playing music we'd never heard of in some small dive. And sitting there, we'd all look at one another with the faces of initiates into some secret society, pleased to have found such strange mysteries so different from anything we'd ever known before.

Saturday mornings were given to basketball, and Saturday afternoons to walking around town, going to the most fabulous bookstore we'd ever seen (having come from a town that did not value books) and feeling as if we might pass out, overwhelmed with all of it, then on to some hippie place for lunch and to the coop for organic food, just walking through the crisp days with hands in the front pockets of our pants looking like the photos we'd seen of Jack Kerouac in San Francisco (another new and "secret" knowledge) until the beginning of dusk. And that night, there might be a movie at the student union, something foreign and strange or just an American film, hip and groovy, or maybe, once in a while, we'd spend money on a theater, but that was rarely necessary. And that night, we'd go stand outside some bar in town with other hipsters making comments on the passing parade. And if the band was really a good one, we'd go inside and listen with raptured attention, and when it was over, we'd walk through the cold and windy streets feeling the buzz of the beer and the scene, jacked to the very edges of life, open to the dark wind and the stars and the moon, heartstrings pulled by the incredible freedom and romance like nothing else in life that would ever happen, in love so deeply we could barely breathe, together but separate, each locked into his own thoughts without words.

It was like that day after day, week after week. It was beautiful and would never end.

"Avatar" and the Midcult Climate

(Photo by Irving Penn)

Let me be the first to tell you that "Avatar" is not all that great. Technically, it is fun. Other than that, it has all the hallmarks of a popular midcult film. As I watched it, I remarked the similarities in temper and spirit with the first three (my young friend corrects me and tells me those are four, five, and six) Star Wars films. Both extol the virtues of the Life Force in Nature to which humans are losing their connections as they become more and more reliant upon Technology. Technology can be overcome, we are instructed, by Spirit ("and if by yes"). Please, don't get me wrong--I like that message. I think it is important for children to learn the value of nature and the profundity of living with it. No doubt.

My mother saw the film before I did, which surprises me since she has probably gone to the theater to see a film twenty times in her life, ten of those since she has retired and started hanging out with "the girls." She told me how good the film was. "Did you see it in 3D?" I asked her. "Oh," she exclaimed with worldly wonder, "it is the only way to see it." I almost peed my pants.

And so, having read no reviews of the film and having heard nothing but raves from those who have already seen it, I went expecting a miracle. I did enjoy sitting next to a ten year old and reaching out to grab the 3D objects that floated inches from our faces. But I mostly found the intermittent 3D images a tricky distraction. The technology still has a long way to go (and it will).

The ten year old loved the movie. He is now ready to ingest People magazine, I think. At only ten. I'll let you know. I'll get him a subscription.

Again, I have read no reviews, so if I'm being redundant, forgive me. I'm sure nobody wrote about my mother, though.

What struck me most as I watched the movie, other than the obvious Star Wars similarities, was the Orientalist view the film takes. Obviously, Cameron has outdone me here. He has a better budget. But I didn't get the sense that there was any self-awareness in his presentation. Nobody will complain, I guess, because the Pandorans are not real. But that can be said of my representations, too.

I'll have to wait a few months and then go back and check what has been said. I'm not interested enough to keep up with it like its the Tiger Woods Story. As I say, I thought it a pretty average film once you get over the nascent technological feat.

I've recently fallen in love with Irving Penn's photography. I'm going to order a few of his books today. I am especially taken with Small Trades which I will copy in some form. But I've a renewed interest in all of his work. I will study it and make a comment here one day.

I've taken the liberty to post an image by him without his permission. I can't get it now. He passed away in November. May the Force be with him.

Zabi Muz

I'm caught in a whirlpool and am waiting to be spit out. It is dangerous and the chances are that I won 't be spit out at all, that I will just circle here until I am pulled under and drown. But sometimes, often enough, I hope, in the variations of water pressure and movement--POP!--out you come. I can see the faces of the people on the shoreline, fascinated, horrified, like a series of snapshots as I twirl 'round and 'round.

I need not have been on the river, I tell myself. I need not have been so brave or silly at all taking my chances so close to danger. But it is how I like to see myself and once in awhile you must take chances if you are to continue to hold the image, however real or false. Swirling for so long, even a potentially drowning man has time to think, and I flashback to all the close calls from which I've escaped before. They have taught me bad things, those experiences, I think realizing how much I envy those spectators onshore. Performing for the crowd. That is what I've done. And not even a large crowd at that, most people neither noticing nor caring for the outrageousness and the antics. "That's what he wanted," I imagine them saying in voices tainted with revulsion and exhilaration when they hear the news. "I never cared for his behavior."

I don't have a photo to post this morning. I've looked. I'll post something from someone else's site that I have downloaded for reference. This is probably from one of Jim Linderman's blogs, but I'm not sure.

Cooler and Cooler

Technology keeps getting cooler and cooler. At the "world's largest technology trade show" yesterday, industry unveiled its newest toys. Giant televisions as slim as a matchbox, televisions that will turn every broadcast into 3D, televisions that encompass the internet. One company has added yellow to the RGB system so that the number of displayed colors will be trillions rather than millions. I'm still watching an old 4:3 television that is not HD. I can't get half the stations my cable service provides. "Still watching" may be the wrong phrasing. I hardly watch it at all. Yup, the technology got me excited for a moment. Watching a sporting event in 3D hypercolor could be fun for a few minutes. I think it might be more fun than watching it in 2D anyway. But I am still watching a lot of black and white. TCM is my Valium and my Xanax. The idea of buying the new technology, then turning it on and being offered shows like "Everybody Likes Somebody," or "Three and a Half Men," or "Oprah" seems especially frustrating.

Still, I think I'd like to watch the stars walk down the red carpet on Sunday night with all the new bells and whistles. With the sound turned down, of course.

Letting Go

Letting go works when you think you are in trouble, but when it begins to look better, you want to cling again. Or so I found yesterday when fortunes swept me from the shitter back to better ground. Chance. Accident. Fate. Whatever. Now I must determine where I will set my foot again. Or should I step at all?

* * * * *

Christmas went as planned, everyone exchanging presents--earth shoes and crockpots and books about living closer to nature--and everyone was happy. Another week passed, and it was a new year. The Nixon Whitehouse was a shambles. Following the resignation of Spiro Agnew, Gerald Ford had been confirmed Vice President of the United States of America. Once again, the Miami Dolphins were in the Super Bowl. And O.J. Simpson became the first running back ever to run for over 2,000 yards in a single season. It seemed to me that I was standing on the precipice of history. Anything could happen.

The Shrinking Parameter

"I've been anxious lately," he told me last night as we sat for a moment drinking a beer. It was a statement of fact, I thought, and didn't require the rendering of opinion on the matter. So, of course, he continued.

"I think I'm going to get the sack at work."

At which point, I thought it only polite to inquire. "Why?"

"My boss doesn't like me. She's an idiot, and I think I've made a point of helping her show that too often. She's turned mean, now. She keeps making my job harder and harder so that I really can't do it any longer. She is going to make it look like a failing in me."

"Well, that's a bit of tyranny, isn't it?"

"Exactly! She is a tyrant. She swaggers like a tyrant. She smirks like a tyrant. I hate her. I really do."

"That's not healthy," I said, immediately embarrassed of sounding like a television analyst. "Do you think she hates you?"

"Yes, yes, absolutely," he said emphatically. "She hates me awfully."

"Well, what can you do about it?"

"I don't know," he replied despondently, shaking his head back and forth to himself. "I've got to do something."

But that's the story of the world, isn't it? Power and conflict, conflict and power. There are lots of people who have it worse than he does, of course, but it wasn't going to do him any good for me to say that. Oppression is oppression. We all feel bound by something outside ourselves. Our minds get small and we think inside shrinking parameters. Hold on, we think. Hold on.

I've been back to work a single day, now, and my mind is getting smaller, too. I have to do many things I don't want to do today, things that are worse than merely wasting time. But like my friend, I'm too afraid to let go.

I've been enamored of the book "Solo Faces" by James Salter for a very long time. On the surface, it is a book about rock climbing, and the final words of the novel are, appropriately, "Hold on," though the words there are used only metaphorically. A close friend, a boy whose marriage I officiated in Yosemite two years ago outside a beautiful old church surrounded by wilderness and mountains, and with whom I've climbed mountains and rock faces more often than with anyone else, quotes that passage to me all the time. There is a certain profundity to it, of course, in the right context. But today, I'm thinking in a different way. I think I will tell myself the opposite thing as I sit through the soul-killing events that I must endure.

"Let go," I will tell myself. "Let go."

Warning: Meat

A few days ago, I said I wanted to walk the world and see things. What I did was not go out for three days. I sat in a chair and read about the world outside. I looked through the windows at the cold, clear world outside. And I cooked. Yesterday, I made my famous vegetable soup. It is more stew than soup, maybe. It is choked with vegetables and meat, a thick, peasants meal if the peasants had a farm and were doing well. By the time I finish, I think it costs me about two dollars a bowl. But on a cold day (and it has been cold here in the sunny south), it is just the thing.

I started with three pounds of stew beef in a big pot and let it cook about twenty minutes. Then I added a chopped head of cabbage, carrots, onions, and potatoes. That got heated to a boil and then got to simmer all afternoon. Later, I added corn and green beans. Consumed with a big loaf of sourdough bread and a bottle of good red wine.

I must return to the world today in the worst way. Holiday break is over. I am back to work. I have been lazy, sleeping and eating and not exercising at all. I've read and brooded. I was awakened hours before sunrise today by a troublesome dream. After that, I was troubled by disturbing thoughts. It was better to get up than to go through that misery.

This is how far I've come since yesterday. I could have easily followed yesterday's advice today.

Nothing

I've tried. Honestly. But I am better off quiet today. If I find something later, I'll post.

Cartography

I haven't bearings yet. I didn't leave the house yesterday. I'm not sure which direction to take this new year. It is winter now, not holiday. There is much to consider. I feel a lethargy and wish to hibernate, or at least fall down for a winter's sleep, but that will be impossible. A vow of silence, perhaps, would do, while I wait and watch and get the lay of the land. Will Self has just published a book about "modern landscapes and contemporary angst" that I will have to read. And a collection of stories by Ha Jin is said to continue to explore the new post-national soul and the search for identity in a many-cultured world.

This article in the New York Times Book Review really got my attention this morning. For those of you who have felt an ambivalence about the contemporary male voice (or worse), Katie Roiphe offers some insights. You can listen the interview here.

There is a lot of re-mapping going on at the same instant that some desire to rid themselves of mapmakers altogether, for borders are still borders and boundaries still boundaries no matter how you draw them. I think I want to walk the world to see for myself, a stranger in a strange land. Really, we all will have to. I don't think we'll have much choice.

New Decade

New Year. Rainy, gray and bleak. I had hope for awhile last night, for as I prepared dinner, I saw the clouds give way to the moon. "I've seen it," I thought to myself, and gave a wave to my old friend. But I wasn't paying attention. It was a dangerous night. I should have stayed home.

Rather, I went downtown to the apartment with the balcony. The trouble began, though, before I left street level. Oh, it looked exciting there, all the girls in tight, short, glittery dresses, all of them as perfectly capable of hosting their own television reality show like "The Girls Next Door" or "The Kardashians." They bubbled over and bent into poses for invisible cameras, laughing in the high, uptalker voices they've all assumed now. The beating began.

It continued upstairs where I was reminded ruthlessly and relentlessly that I was not in the running for the handsomest man in the room any more. The beating continued.

I stayed too late, watched the ball drop in Times Square, watched the animated Dick Clark grin into the camera. The noise of party whistles filled the room while outside fireworks burst over the lake.

I woke alone in the dark to a rain storm and the cat's meow, got up, drank some water, gave her some food, and went back to bed.

I'd hoped for better. But here it is, the new decade. "Blue Moon."I should have listened to the lyrics.

I think I'll quit drinking.